Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. may be most associated with his efforts to desegregate the South, but the minister also had a valuable and lasting relationship with New England, and with Harvard.

Harvard President Drew Faust delivered Morning Prayers on Friday, offering those gathered in Appleton Chapel for the solemn service a deeply personal reflection on her experience with the Civil Rights Movement 50 years ago.

The events unfolding in Ferguson, Mo., are being watched around the world. The way the grand jury’s decision and its aftermath are being perceived abroad may be categorically different than how they are understood at home, according to Harvard Kennedy School historian and Associate Professor Moshik Temkin on this week’s episode of PolicyCast.

The Rev. Jonathan Walton, Harvard’s Pusey Minister of Memorial Church and Plummer Professor of Christian Morals, galvanized Boston’s 43rd annual Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Breakfast with a keynote speech that contrasted the present-day ”sanitized and sterilized” version of the civil rights leader’s dream for America with the real message of economic inclusiveness that he left behind

Two panel discussions, organized by the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, examined the “promise and perils” of creating digital repositories of genetic records and considered the policy implications of an individual’s right to access, control, and interpret his or her own genetic data.

The Civil Rights Movement spurred Harvard President Drew Faust to youthful activism and influenced her choice to become a historian of the American South, Faust told the Harvard Business School’s first-year class, urging students to keep their desire to make a difference at the forefront of their minds.

English political philosopher John Locke died nearly a century before the American Revolution, and in his time parliamentary democracy was in its infancy.
But his Enlightenment ideas — including the right to life, liberty, and property — went on to inspire American revolutionaries.

Experience the stirring sights and plangent sounds of a singular Spring Break, during which Harvard students worked to renovate Katrina-ravaged houses, tutored children in afterschool programs, and met — and sang with — pioneers of the Civil Rights Movement, like Hollis Watkins (harmonizing, above from left with students Diane Ghogomu '10 and Sumorwuo Zaza '11).

It was a homecoming of sorts when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, spoke at a conference on gender and the law today (March 12) at a conference at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Simone de Beauvoir would likely have had a lot to say at a slightly belated 100th anniversary of her birth on Feb. 20 at the Barker Center as a collection of great minds gathered to discuss her great ideas.

On Monday (Feb. 9), a team of experts assembled at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government (HKS) to examine the history and profound impact of the tall, awkward, self-taught man from rural Kentucky who is credited with bringing about an end to slavery and saving the nation’s cherished founding principle of democratic rule.

The W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University recently gave a Masonic membership certificate signed by Prince Hall, a minister, abolitionist, and civil rights activist known as the father of Black Freemasonry in the United States, to Houghton Library.

For the first time in a generation, urban policy is back on the national agenda.
Advocates for the nation’s cities have been thrilled by the announcement that the Obama administration will include a White House Office of Urban Policy.

Brown University cultural historian Robert O. Self — a Radcliffe Fellow this year — made a name for himself with his book “American Babylon” (Princeton University Press, 2003). He was the first scholar to connect the civil rights struggle with postwar white flight to the suburbs, and the tax incentives that made suburbanization possible.

From Aaron, a former slave without a last name, through Paul Burgess Zuber, a 20th century lawyer and professor, the recently published African American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2008) is the most extensive and inclusive collection of biographical information about African American lives ever published.
The African American National Biography (AANB), co-edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Higginbotham, is an eight-volume series that includes biographies of more than 4,000 African Americans throughout 500 years, dating back to the arrival of Esteban, the first recorded African explorer to set foot in North America.

Most of us think of the Civil Rights movement as something that took place in the transitional 1950s and the tumultuous 1960s. It’s seen as a cultural artifact squeezed between the defiance of Rosa Parks (1955) and the demise of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968).

Certain adages exist about historical repetition: those who don’t remember the past are doomed to repeat it, for example, or history doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. Walter Johnson doesn’t necessary believe in these old chestnuts, but he does see how the past and the present can illuminate one another in order to provide each greater context, urgency, and understanding.

It’s been half a century, but it feels like just yesterday for at least one member of the “Little Rock Nine.” “I can’t feel this so strong, it doesn’t make sense … you are supposed to be over it,” says an emotional Minnijean Brown Trickey in the opening of the film “Little Rock Central High: 50 Years Later,” as she walks the grounds in front of the historic Arkansas site. The school was at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement.

Einstein’s response to the racism and segregation he found in Princeton was to cultivate relationships in the town’s African-American community. Jerome and Taylor interviewed members of that community who still remember the white-haired, disheveled figure of Einstein strolling through their streets, stopping to chat with the inhabitants, and handing out candy to local children.

The Office for Diversity and Community Partnership at Harvard Medical School (HMS), together with HMS teaching affiliate Cambridge Health Alliance, bestowed the inaugural Ruth M. Batson Social Justice Award on Tuesday (April 10) at the School’s New Research Building during the Reflection in Action: Building Healthy Communities event.

Like a courtroom version of “High Noon,” legal guns are squaring off this year in a confrontation over the Second Amendment.
And whoever wins, the battle will touch off a longtime culture war that rivals Roe v. Wade, said National Rifle Association (NRA) President Sandra Froman in an April 5 visit to Harvard.